Caption: In between, by Gauthier DELECROIX (CC BY 2.0)
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/photo-in-between-by-gauthier-delecroix/
Wednesday 30 November 2022
Photo: In between, by Gauthier DELECROIX
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/photo-in-between-by-gauthier-delecroix/
Minitrue: Rules for E-commerce Livestreams and Movie Theatres During Official Mourning Period For Jiang Zemin
The following censorship instructions have been leaked and distributed online.
Based on the national public memorial requirements just issued today, there will be a public mourning period from November 30 to December 7, and the funeral on December 6. All function units must pay close attention to and implement the following items.
1. Over the next few days, get rid of any celebratory content, and do not publish new entertainment-heavy content until December 7.
2. All channels should make coordinated preparations for black-and-white color schemes tonight in order to be ready for unified adoption when instructed.
3. Strictly maintain standards in this week’s livestreams: keep backdrops clean and simple and clothing up to standard; suspend appearances of soccer babes, etc., without exception; only stream routine sales talk; and take care not to have large blocks of red or other bright colors in backdrops! Wear formal attire.
4. On December 6, all stores must suspend sales livestreams. (November 30, 2022) [Chinese]
Urgent Notice: Just got a phone call from provincial film authorities about four instructions for movie theaters during the period from December 1-7:
1. Theaters must not schedule comedies or foreign films. These can’t be screened, even if they have been previously scheduled or if tickets have been sold.
2. Be serious and solemn. There should be no festive or celebratory atmosphere.
3. Theaters should turn off their LED screens.
4. Theatres are prohibited from screening World Cup matches or reality shows. (November 30, 2022) [Chinese]
These two sets of instructions, which appear to be internal company communiques, provide guidance on e-commerce and movie theatre operations during the official mourning period for former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, whose death was announced by official media on Wednesday. An earlier directive published by CDT, along with more background on Jiang’s death and legacy, contained similar requirements from the state broadcast regulator for online streaming and other media platforms.
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/minitrue-rules-for-e-commerce-livestreams-and-movie-theatres-during-official-mourning-period-for-jiang-zemin/
Minitrue: Online Management Requirements For The Mourning of Jiang Zemin
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.
Online media platform management requirements for the mourning period from the National Radio and Television Administration’s Online Media Department:
The “mourning period” will last from November 30 – December 7, and the funeral will take place on December 6.
Overall tone: solemn and dignified, affectionate and orderly.
1. During the mourning period, the color scheme of website home pages, app home screens, and pages that link to reports about mourning activities should be changed to black and white. Note: content related to General Secretary Xi or 20th Party Congress special coverage may not be changed to black and white.
2. Suspend streaming entertainment programs during the mourning period.
a. Suspend new online entertainment programming.
b. Pull existing entertainment programming from home pages and home screens, and use those spaces to recommend weighty historical and revolutionary main-melody content. Do not recommend World Cup content on home pages, with the exception of match livestreams.
3. Completely suspend bullet screens throughout the mourning period. Completely disable the “Like” function on mourning-related content. Do not show entertainment topics in “Hot Search” or “Trending Topic” lists.
4. Correctly handle the relationship between mourning content and other kinds of content so as to achieve a harmonious tone and avoid misreadings or misunderstandings. Do not use ads incongruous with mourning activities. Do not place ads before or after reports on mourning activities, and show no commercial advertising at all on the day of the funeral. Do not run ads whose content includes mourning for Jiang Zemin. Do not run any commercial advertising related to the mourning activities. At the end of the mourning period, resumption of normal advertising should not be excessively abrupt.
5. Streaming platforms should uphold the highest standards in terms of presenters’ clothing, adornment, words, behavior, programming content, etc.
6. In case of uncertainty, all platforms should use CCTV’s website and app as the standard. (November 30, 2022) [Chinese]
Jiang Zemin, who led China through the pivotal period from its ostracization after the Tiananmen crackdown to its accession to the World Trade Organization, has died aged 96, according to state media. Although Jiang leaves a mixed legacy, his tenure has increasingly been viewed with nostalgia amid the tightening political environment under Xi Jinping, with effusive praise for Jiang often being used as a veiled expression of discontent with his successors. Amid persistent rumors of his death, self-described “Toad worshippers” would frequently wish him long life, and several related phrases have (perhaps counterintuitively) been targeted by censors online. These sensitivities previously came to a head in 2014, when the installation of a 72-foot inflatable toad in Beijing’s Yuyuantan Park became a focus of subversive nostalgia, and subsequently a censorship hotspot. Jiang’s death is therefore particularly sensitive given widespread protests around China against not only harsh pandemic control policies, but also to some extent against Xi himself.
The websites of People’s Daily, Xinhua, and CCTV all turned black and white to mark Jiang’s death, though CCTV’s English homepage remained in color as this was published. Commercial outlets followed suit with the color change, though some, such as Sohu, appeared to drag their feet in downplaying World Cup content. The Chinese homepages of official media sites were headed by an identical banner proclaiming that “the memory of Comrade Jiang Zemin will live forever,” and announcing a “letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Standing Committee of ther National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, the State Council of the PRC, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission of the CPC and the PRC to the Whole Party, the Whole Army, and the People of Various Ethnic Groups All Over the Country.” (The same formulation was used to announce the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997.)
An English-language report from Xinhua relays the letter’s content. It alludes vaguely to Jiang’s role in navigating “severe political disturbances” and “unprecedented difficulties and pressures” “between the late 1980s and early 1990s,” before extolling at some length the importance of unity behind Jiang’s current successor:
The letter says they proclaim with profound grief to the whole Party, the entire military and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups that our beloved Comrade Jiang Zemin died of leukemia and multiple organ failure after all medical treatments had failed.
The letter says that Comrade Jiang Zemin was an outstanding leader enjoying high prestige acknowledged by the whole Party, the entire military and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat, a long-tested communist fighter, and an outstanding leader of the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics. He was the core of the CPC’s third generation of central collective leadership and the principal founder of the Theory of Three Represents.
[…] The letter says that Jiang was the core of the CPC’s third generation of central collective leadership. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, severe political disturbances erupted in the international arena and in China. World socialism experienced serious twists and turns. The development of China’s socialist cause faced unprecedented difficulties and pressures.
At this critical historical juncture that determined the future and destiny of the Party and the state, Jiang led the central collective leadership of the CPC and firmly relied on the whole Party, the entire military and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups to unequivocally uphold the Four Cardinal Principles, and safeguard national independence, dignity, security and stability. He also unswervingly took economic development as the central task, adhered to reform and opening-up, defended the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and broke new ground in China’s reform and opening-up as well as socialist modernization.
[…] We must rally around the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core with greater resolve and purpose, and adhere to the Party’s basic theory, basic line, and basic policy, the letter says.
We must develop a deep understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and establishing the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.
[…] Eternal glory to Comrade Jiang Zemin! [Source]
At The New York Times, Chris Buckley offered a more mixed assessment of Jiang’s legacy:
[… I]t was not a coincidence that Mr. Jiang’s years in office were the golden age of China’s embrace of globalization. He won China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in late 2001 after years of contentious negotiations, primarily with the United States. And he overhauled Communist Party doctrine, modernizing a movement rooted in the working classes and peasantry into one that courted and co-opted intellectuals and an emerging business elite.
His critics in China and abroad viewed these steps as little more than tacking with the political winds. And in truth, Mr. Jiang’s pro-market leanings commingled with an intolerance of dissent. After members of the Falun Gong spiritual sect surrounded the Communist Party headquarters in protest in April 1999, he pressed for mass detentions, which set the pattern for later rounds of repression and for an increasingly powerful security state.
[…] Mr. Jiang will forever be known first as the man party elders plucked out of relative obscurity in 1989 when they were preparing to order the armed suppression of student protests based in Tiananmen Square. His hasty elevation to the pinnacle of China’s Communist Party led many to believe that his time there might well be brief and unremarkable. Even Mr. Jiang thought so.
[…] “You could see that he wanted to be thought of as somebody who was not the sort of retrograde, Leninist leader clinging to his notes,” said the journalist Orville Schell, who was on Mr. Clinton’s trip and who is now director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. “He wanted China to emerge out of the chrysalis of its isolation.” [Source]
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/minitrue-online-management-requirements-for-the-mourning-of-jiang-zemin/
Tuesday 29 November 2022
Minitrue: Three Leaked Censorship Directives Target Anti-Lockdown Protests and Censorship-circumvention Tools
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.
Cyberspace Administration of China
6:11 P.M., November 29, 2022
Notification: Thorough Clean-up and Regulation of Firewall-circumvention Tools, Goods and Services (Submit daily feedback before 12:00 noon)
In line with a previous assessment of the situation, all platforms are requested to carry out a thorough clean-up and regulation of tools used to bypass the Firewall:
First, e-commerce platforms should continue their concerted efforts to clean up online sales of goods and services used to circumvent the Firewall. These include Firewall-circumvention routers, VPNs, web accelerators, VPS [virtual private servers], overseas Apple accounts, etc.
Second, thoroughly investigate, clean up and remove all illegal Firewall-circumvention software or tools from app stores and file-hosting services.
Third, UGC [“user-generated content”] platforms that share user-generated or self-published audiovisual material should clean up harmful content that instructs users in circumvention techniques, such as “Firewall circumvention,” “accessing the Internet scientifically,” etc.
Fourth, all search engines should continue implementing a clean-up of search results related to bypassing the Firewall, and limit the spread of keywords such as “Firewall circumvention,” “accessing the Internet scientifically,” etc.
Fifth, each day before 12:00 noon, submit daily feedback for the previous 24-hour period. At the same time, when submitting recommendations for content to be banned, please include the name of the circumvention software (and attach the software installation package, if available) and the IP address of the server used to circumvent the Firewall. List these separately. [Chinese]
Cyberspace Administration of China
6:13 P.M., November 29, 2022
November 29 Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) management coordination videoconference:
- Yesterday, Minister Niu [Niu Yibing, deputy director of the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission] held a National Cyberspace Administration System management coordination videoconference. Based on the current situation, it was deemed necessary to initiate a Level I Internet Emergency Response, the highest level of content management. Key managers should take a hands-on approach, and strengthen content management. Given the recent high-profile events in various provinces, information about offline disturbances and backflows of overseas information must be rapidly identified, dealt with, and reported.
- The incident on November 24 triggered expressions of various grievances; pernicious political slogans appeared in Shanghai; college and university students held conspicuous political gatherings; smears by foreign media increased; and various websites have strengthened their content management.
- Public opinion management and control: err on the side of strict management and control of content related to public gatherings, people rushing COVID checkpoints, and particularly content related to colleges and universities. Strengthen preliminary auditing, and stringently investigate incendiary accounts.
- Emphasize discipline and discretion, and do not allow work instructions to be leaked.
- Last night, there was overseas hype about a public gathering in Huangzhuang, Haidian district [Beijing]. Today, the direction seems to be Yayuncun [Asian Games Village] and other areas in Chaoyang district. Pay careful attention to this, and promptly identify and report related content.
- Tomorrow, November 30, marks one week since the deaths that occurred on November 24; December 9 is International Anti-Corruption Day; and December 10 is International Human Rights Day. Pay careful attention to these and other sensitive dates, maintain strict controls, and strengthen preliminary content audits.
- Promptly identify and report content aimed at stirring up public sentiment or any such similarly “targeted” content.
- Focus on public opinion about the pandemic in Beijing. [Chinese]
Three leaked censorship directives—the two above from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), and another from a local government—appear aimed at suppressing news about the recent nationwide spate of anti-lockdown protests, cracking down on censorship-circumvention tools, and reining in local propagandists in an effort to quell public sentiment. For more background on the protests, and on the deadly fire in Urumqi that touched them off, CDT has published a number of articles detailing the memorials, public gatherings, and slogans, as well as the responses (or lack thereof) by state media, the government, law enforcement, and online censors.
The two CAC directives, which have been archived and translated by CDT editors, first appeared on the Twitter account @whyyoutouzhele (also known as 李老师不是你老师, Li laoshi bu shi ni laoshi). The owner of the account, who has reportedly received death threats for their tweets about current events in China, noted that “Someone affiliated with the Cyberspace Administration of China submitted this. In the near future, tools for bypassing the Great Firewall (GFW) will be more strictly regulated. Also, be alert to some key dates coming up.”
The first CAC directive is targeted at cracking down on tools used to circumvent internet controls and gain access to blocked overseas websites. The second references a high-level, multi-agency meeting of cyberspace administrators, at which a “Level I Internet Emergency Response” was initiated. The directive’s eight points include a number of measures meant to muffle news of the protests, distract the public, and avoid further inflaming popular opinion.
A third directive appears to be from a local government. A leaked screenshot shows a text-messaging group called the “District Propaganda Department Working Group,” with 129 members, and the following brief message:
The city requests that all counties and districts refrain from unnecessary propaganda about the trials and tribulations of frontline pandemic prevention and control work. Exercise extreme caution when publicizing “model deeds” on the frontline, particularly if this includes images or video. At present, there are so many vicious currents online that the response is all too often a chorus of criticism, which generates public controversy. [Chinese]
Two members of the text-messaging group responded, simply, “Received.”
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/minitrue-three-leaked-censorship-directives-target-anti-lockdown-protests-and-censorship-circumvention-tools/
From Spam-bots to Crowd Shots, Authorities Seek to Distract Amid Anti-Lockdown Protests
As thousands across China erupted into a weekend of nationwide protests following a deadly fire in Urumqi, authorities used various propaganda tactics in traditional and social media to minimize the spread of public discontent and divert attention away from both the protests and other potential fuel for people’s frustrations with pandemic controls.
State media largely ignored the protests. In Tuesday’s edition of the People’s Daily, there was no mention of the pandemic situation on the front page, but a commentary on the second page called for all local governments to “further unify their thoughts and actions with the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions” regarding pandemic prevention. In his Tracking People’s Daily newsletter, Manoj Kewalramani interpreted the commentary as “demanding flexibility and adaptability from local governments, while calling on them to work as per the prescribed central guidelines. There is clearly a suggestion that local officials should address what might be problems or onerous practices and also control key risks (how should a local official interpret that if there are protests?), but this is not a call for easing the broad policy approach.”
On Monday, CCTV showcased one commentator’s description of the pandemic situation: “The government and people are as tightly linked and united as one strong rope.” At The Guardian, Jonathan Yerushalmy reported on how other state media outlets covered, or ignored, the protests and their context over the weekend:
Protests flared across Chinese cities over the weekend, with calls for political freedoms and an end to Covid lockdowns.
[…] However, none of that was evident on the front pages of some of the country’s most prominent newspapers, or on broadcast channels on Monday. After a night of unrest, CCTV spent most of the morning covering the announcement of the planned launch of the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft to China’s space station on Tuesday. The English language Global Times’ main headline focused on the weekend’s local elections in Taiwan, while Shanghai media reported on the latest industrial revenue figures.
[…] Most of Hong Kong’s mainstream media, normally fast to respond to news on mainland China, meanwhile delayed the reporting of the ubiquitous protests across China by one day and led the stories from the official angle. Most led with the Covid case numbers, or official insistence of the Covid control and played down on the details and colour of the protests themselves. [Source]
Twitter was another medium where coverage of the protests was distorted. CDT catalogued the ways in which the protests were tracked and analyzed on Twitter by various groups in the face of malicious interference and other obstacles. Researchers and journalists noted that a host of Chinese-language bots muddied the waters. Alex Stamos, former Facebook security chief and now director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that this activity appeared to be designed to limit international observation of the protests and constituted a “major failure” by Twitter to limit government interference. Some accounts initially appeared to support protesters but later called on them to stop, prompting suspicions of malicious intent. One of them had amassed over 40 thousand followers after just days of being created. Joseph Menn from The Washington Post first reported on the Chinese Twitter accounts that obscured news of the protests:
Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.
The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.
[…] Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.” [Source]
wtf… I thought this was a genuine account and even recommended following and now it turns out it's a entrapment/covert op account??! pic.twitter.com/B2wkgfRZIs
— Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻♀️ #A4Revolution (@chenchenzh) November 28, 2022
Thread: Search for Beijing/Shanghai/other cities in Chinese on Twitter and you'll mostly see ads for escorts/porn/gambling, drowning out legitimate search results.
Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a *significant* uptick in these spam tweets. pic.twitter.com/Ao46g2ILzf— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022
There were other suspected efforts to flood the zone. Chinese internet celebrity Pangzai posted a tweet on Monday after a long period of absence. He has been lauded by the Global Times as an “image ambassador” and featured among other Chinese vloggers whom state media has praised for advancing China’s soft power abroad. On Friday, news about the rape conviction of Chinese-Canadian rapper Kris Wu held the number one spot on Weibo’s trending topics, despite having less engagement than news of the Urumqi fire. Wu was sentenced on Friday, the day after the Urumqi fire, and some people in WeChat groups reportedly questioned whether his sentencing, after a prosecution “shrouded in secrecy,” was deliberately announced on that date in order to distract the public.
Chinese authorities and official media announced the sentencing of actor Kris Wu today to distract public attention. This time it's like throwing a pebble into the ocean.
— Dali L. Yang (@Dali_Yang) November 25, 2022
The activity on Twitter and Weibo fits the pattern of previous Chinese efforts to distort online content related to unpopular pandemic controls. In early September, a leaked local directive described a “campaign of comment flooding” on Weibo to distract from mass online protests against lockdowns in Yili (or Ili), Xinjiang. Days later, two more leaked censorship directives outlined official strategies to “win this smokeless war” over online discourse about the effect of pandemic controls in Xinjiang. Ironically, earlier this month, three men were investigated for “criminal comment flooding” for social media posts trying to bring attention to the suffering of Xinjiang residents under lockdown.
Another government attempt to distract from China’s strict pandemic controls has occurred in official coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Several reporters noticed that in contrast to broadcasters in other countries, CCTV has mostly refused to show close-up images of fans—most of whom are cheering without masks and tightly packed next to one another in the stands. Kerry Allen from the BBC reported on reactions by Chinese fans stuck in a very different pandemic reality than those in other countries:
An open letter questioning the country’s continued zero-Covid policies and asking if China was “on the same planet” as Qatar quickly spread on mobile messenger WeChat on Tuesday, before being censored.
[…] Some [on Weibo] speak of their perception that it is “weird” to see hundreds of thousands of people gathering, without wearing masks or needing to show evidence of a recent Covid-19 test. “There are no separate seats so people can maintain social distance, and there is nobody dressed in white and blue [medical] garb on the sidelines. This planet has become really divided.”
“On one side of the world, there is the carnival that is the World Cup, on the other are rules not to visit public places for five days,” one says. [Source]
In case it's not clear from other posts, CCTV is the one manipulating games on the fly, NOT the other streaming platforms, who, in the absence of a mandate from above, would absolutely want to show their viewers the best possible shots – starting with emotive fan close-ups. pic.twitter.com/9HHOSUrQEx
— Mark Dreyer (@DreyerChina) November 29, 2022
I literally just spent the past two hours watching parallel feeds of the Brazil-Switzerland game and there were FORTY-TWO times where CCTV avoided showing crowd/fan close-ups. I saw ONE crowd close-up on CCTV (of former Brazilian players) at the start of the game. That's it. https://t.co/mibyYWoVSN
— Mark Dreyer (@DreyerChina) November 28, 2022
Some people still refusing to see this, so decided to track it. Within a minute, there was this: close-up shots of Canadian and Croatian fans on BBC/international feed, replaced by a solo shot of Canadian coach John Herdman on CCTV. pic.twitter.com/V3DZRjHrzk
— Mark Dreyer (@DreyerChina) November 27, 2022
In a twist to the story, FIFA apparently issued a takedown notice against the videos in one viral tweet showing how CCTV’s coverage omits fans, prompting some analysts to speculate whether the Chinese government may have been involved. These suspicions come as FIFA faces sharp criticism over other human rights issues surrounding the tournament. Chun Han Wong at The Wall Street Journal shared other reactions from soccer analysts in China:
“Unreasonable, I’ve no words apart from this is unreasonable,” one soccer-focused blogger wrote on Weibo. “If you’re so scared, why don’t you just not broadcast the World Cup, and instead make up some fake news that the World Cup has been canceled due to excessive Covid-related deaths in the West.”
[…F]or Chinese fans, watching the World Cup is “like peeking behind the curtains,” said [Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based analyst of China’s sports industry]. “People can see that life is different overseas, and not perhaps as they’ve been told.” [Source]
Authorities are also incentivizing students not to gather for protests. Over the weekend, some universities announced that they are moving classes online and offering to send students back to their hometowns. Protests this weekend have reportedly taken place at least 79 universities across the country, and given the critical role of students in many of China’s most prominent uprisings, authorities may seek to prevent them from organizing further. Joe McDonald, Dake Kang, and Huizhong Wu at the Associated Press reported on these university efforts to send students home:
Beijing’s Tsinghua University, where students rallied over the weekend, and other schools in the capital and the southern province of Guangdong sent students home. The schools said they were being protected from COVID-19, but dispersing them to far-flung hometowns also reduces the likelihood of more demonstrations. Chinese leaders are wary of universities, which have been hotbeds of activism including the Tiananmen protests.
On Sunday, Tsinghua students were told they could go home early for the semester. The school, which is Xi’s alma mater, arranged buses to take them to the train station or airport.
[…] Universities said classes and final exams would be conducted online.
Authorities hope to “defuse the situation” by clearing out campuses, said Dali Yang, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. [Source]
So the students at all these universities are free to go home now.
Interesting correlation with the list of university protests yesterday. https://t.co/HhyI9upwNt pic.twitter.com/qCwEw2ktOt— Henry Gao (@henrysgao) November 28, 2022
Tsinghua university right now👇🏼 city after city seeing protests small and large against Zero Covid policies and against excesses of Communist Party rule – every hour there seems to be a new one pic.twitter.com/7CbUtzNmjR
— Emily Feng 冯哲芸 (@EmilyZFeng) November 27, 2022
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/from-spam-bots-to-crowd-shots-authorities-seek-to-distract-amid-anti-lockdown-protests/
Sunday 27 November 2022
Wednesday 23 November 2022
Translation: “Ten Questions” Not to Ask About Pandemic Policy
Earlier this week, screenshots of “Ten Questions” about China’s pandemic policy began making the rounds on the Chinese internet and social media, attracting a great deal of interest and commentary. Those screenshots have now been deleted, and the WeChat account (长安课堂, Chang’an Ketang, or “Chang’an Classroom”) that posted the article has been permanently banned. CDT has translated the article in full, below, as well as a selection of netizen comments compiled from around the web and from social media. Some of the stances implied by the questions may be controversial, but the posting’s widespread appeal illustrates popular frustration with the intensity and unpredictability of China’s pandemic control regime, while its predictable erasure highlights the tight limits on public discussion.
Ten Questions
As an ordinary peon, I would like to pose the ten questions below to the National Health Commission, the organization responsible for overseeing public health. Might I trouble you to answer the following?
Question One: Is the main responsibility of the National Health Commission to compile data related to COVID-19? How much public outreach work has the National Health Commission done regarding medical treatment for COVID-19 patients? Has the National Health Commission made public the fatality rate of the Omicron variant? How many people has the National Health Commission punished for implementing excessive pandemic prevention measures at the grassroots level? Does the National Health Commission think that this year’s extended, months-long lockdowns in Xinjiang, Tibet and other areas are appropriate?
Question Two: In human history, have we ever successfully eradicated any strain of influenza virus? If not, how can we possibly eliminate SARS-CoV-2? And if it cannot be eliminated, what is the cost of continuing to carry out a “zero-COVID” policy against an invisible, intangible virus? Just how useful are multiple rounds of nucleic acid testing?
Question Three: The vast majority of people have received three or more doses of the vaccine, so why are outbreaks of infections continuing apace? Do the vaccines actually work?
Question Four: Compared to other influenza viruses, is Omicron’s fatality rate low or high? How many people has Omicron actually killed?
Question Five: When it comes to managing COVID-19, what are our benchmarks for lifting restrictions? If there are no objective, scientific benchmarks, does that mean that the restrictions will simply continue?
Question Six: The three recent fatalities in Beijing were all elderly, bedridden patients. How did they get infected? Did contact-tracing find the source of infection? Is it possible that nucleic acid tests yield false positives when someone is infected with the flu? If so, what is the point of nucleic acid testing?
Question Seven: What is our COVID prevention and control policy based on? Is it based on data, or modeling, or speculation? Experts such as Zhong Nanshan, Zhang Wenhong, and Zhang Boli have said that the virulence of Omicron is very low. Why should we put so much effort into trying to manage and control a not-at-all-deadly disease?
Question Eight: Due to systemic differences, Hong Kong, whose population density is much higher than that of the mainland, has never required mass nucleic acid testing for all residents, and pandemic restrictions have been relaxed for the past several months. Life in Hong Kong is back to normal. Has the medical system there been overwhelmed? Why not, and why is the mainland so worried about the medical system being, as they say, “overwhelmed”? Aren’t there [vulnerable] elderly people and children in Hong Kong, too?
Question Nine: More than 120 countries worldwide have long since lifted COVID-related restrictions or controls. Has public health in these countries been harmed? Are their people living normal lives? Why can they live more freely than Chinese people? The World Cup just kicked off in Qatar. None of the fans were wearing masks, and no one was asked to show a nucleic acid test certificate. Are we even living on the same planet as them? Can COVID-19 not harm them?
Question Ten: India and China have roughly similar population sizes, although India has less than half of China’s landmass—and what is the pandemic situation in India like? In Africa, Nigeria’s pandemic prevention efforts have achieved remarkable results. So why not look to India, whose national conditions are similar to China’s? Why not learn from Nigeria, instead of tallying case counts in the U.S.? What practical significance does that have for China’s pandemic prevention and control?
Is it too much to ask that the National Health Commission take the above questions into serious consideration before deciding on and deploying pandemic prevention policy? [Chinese]
Below is a selection of netizen comments responding to “Ten Questions,” collected, archived, and translated by CDT editors:
wayky: Strange, there are more than 100,000+ views. Why didn’t anyone leave comments? // 长安课堂 [the author of the ten questions]: I saw that there were more than 200 comments.
Zihann今天吃啥好纠结：Now this is positive energy!
程娅敏：I’d like to add one question preemptively: Why was this article deleted?
Ingew：We don’t solve problems. We “solve” the people who ask about them.
徐斌辉：It’s such a good article that I predict it will be “harmonized.”
晓芬：To prevent it being harmonized, I’ve already taken screenshots.
王小东：I hope that someone really does step forward to answer these questions.
刘老师13361787700：If this article gets deleted, we have a long dark night ahead of us! [Chinese]
Also being censored is the term “十一问” (“eleven questions,” or “eleventh question”). The term was used by many supporters of the article to criticize or mock the fact that it was deleted. One now-deleted example shows a screenshot of the Chinese constitution and a quote from the section about the rights and duties of Chinese citizens:
Title on the red book cover: “The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.”
What gives you the right to delete “Ten questions”?
Chapter II The Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens
Article 35 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/translation-ten-questions-not-to-ask-about-pandemic-policy/
Photo: Drama clouds over the buildings, by QuantFoto
Drama clouds over the buildings, by QuantFoto (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/photo-drama-clouds-over-the-buildings-by-quantfoto/
Shrinking Birth Rates Accelerate China’s Demographic Crisis
While Xi Jinping may profess confidence that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” China’s birth rates are rapidly diminishing. Recently released official statistics suggest continued deepening of looming demographic crises that the government has struggled to avert through various attempts to incentivize marriage and procreation. The endurance of restrictive COVID-19 policies and a floundering economy compound China’s challenge of fostering a more sustainable demography. At the South China Morning Post, Luna Sun reported that over a third of China’s provinces saw their populations shrink last year:
Among China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions, 13 reported more deaths than births last year.
[…] And for at least six of the jurisdictions, the population declines were their first in modern history. This helped drive China’s national birth rate down to 7.52 per 1,000 people in 2021 – the lowest rate since record-keeping began in 1949.
[…] Official data shows that China’s population grew by just 480,000 to 1.4126 billion last year – the smallest population increase since 1962, and a sharp decline from the 2.04 million increase in 2020.
Chinese mothers gave birth to just 10.62 million babies in 2021 – an 11.5 per cent decline from 2020. [Source]
At Sixth Tone, Yang Caini described the geographic distribution of these statistics on declining birth rates:
China’s three northeastern “Rust Belt” provinces — Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning — have been experiencing negative population growth for several years, but this trend is now spreading into the country’s more developed areas.
In 2021, several regions saw their populations shrink for the first time, including Hunan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Tianjin, Shanxi, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
[…] Xu Jian, a demographer, previously told Sixth Tone that China may need to brace itself for the possibility that the country’s population decline “cannot be halted.” [Source]
Increasing marriage rates has been an important goal for the government to increase births, but COVID-19 policies have become an obstacle. Incessant, unpredictable, and interminable lockdowns have prevented many young people from going out to socialize. “This constant uncertainty is exhausting. I want to go out, to see the world,” one young woman told Le Monde in frustration. Liyan Qi from The Wall Street Journal described how China’s COVID-19 controls hurt its push for more weddings:
During the second quarter of the year when lockdowns to stem Covid outbreaks rippled across China and many local registrar offices temporarily closed, marriage registrations dropped 20% from a year earlier, according to data released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
The drop for the first half of the year was 10%, for a total of 3.7 million marriage registrations, the lowest six-month number since 2007, when the ministry started breaking out quarterly marriage data.
[…Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,] estimates that China’s Covid prevention measures have caused a reduction in births by about one million over the course of 2021 and 2022 and expects the policies to hurt birth numbers in 2023. [Source]
Employment issues have also made it harder for young people to think about marriage. Restrictive pandemic policies have pushed local governments into fiscal deficits, and the ensuing austerity measures hit young civil servants hard. Some have suffered salary cuts of 30 percent even while forced to work overtime to implement virus-control policies, making it markedly less affordable to start a family. Gao Feng from VOA reported on other pandemic-related, systemic obstacles to marriage and procreation:
Fu-Xian Yi, senior scientist of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told VOA Mandarin that many Chinese families are reluctant to have children because of high housing prices and declining income.
Yi said, “China’s housing prices are too expensive, which makes it difficult for ordinary people to raise children. The employment rate has fallen, and the unemployment rate has increased. The policies for COVID testing and quarantinization are making it difficult for pregnant women and children. China’s economic growth is declining,” so people worry about providing for offspring as incomes shrink. [Source]
Finding the right incentives has been particularly difficult for the government. Many Gen-Zers are increasingly prone to view marriage with skepticism: respondents to a recent survey by Sixth Tone expressed a “fear of marriage,” describing it as “unnecessary,” “optional,” “a piece of shit,” and “whatever.” In one recent development that might help change these attitudes, the government amended the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Women, which among other measures adds protections to female employees’ birth rights. In another related development, a city in Guangxi recently announced a policy to provide childbirth subsidies to unmarried mothers, who are traditionally excluded from such incentives.
Demographic shifts are also affecting the older end of the population spectrum. As Alexandra Stevenson and Zixu Wang reported for The New York Times on Tuesday, “China’s grandparents are done babysitting and ready to go viral” by challenging traditional views about aging and happiness:
With more than 260 million residents over 60, China has the largest, and fastest-growing, population of old people in the world. Nearly half are online, where some choose to live out their professional dreams, while others are simply having a little fun. Many find companionship through their fans, an antidote to an otherwise lonely life. They are among a new generation of Chinese retirees who have fewer grandchildren than those before and the financial freedom to pursue hobbies and share their experiences online.
[…] “For previous generations, their lives were more confined to within the family, watching TV and taking care of children,” said Bei Wu, a professor of global health at New York University. “But now this generation, because they have less grandchild-raising responsibilities, they have more leisure time, their scope of activity is beyond the family, and so the role of their friends and social lives is greater.” [Source]
source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/shrinking-birth-rates-accelerate-chinas-demographic-crisis/
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